Partners: HP ConvergedSystem Sharks Will Tear Up Competitors

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HP Converged Systems Executive Vice President Tom Joyce said the message regarding the new systems is simple: "You are going to get it faster. It is going to work better. It is going to be higher performance and it is going to cost less." HP estimates a 20 percent reduction in total cost of ownership on the new systems compared to hardware compute, storage and networking resources managed separately, said Joyce.

The biggest bang for solution providers, said Joyce, is going to be the astronomical increase in time to billable hours for highly trained staff. The new systems take what was once a "quote and configuration" for a select customer from a several week process on several dozen sheets of paper down to a 20 minute process on a single sheet of paper, said Joyce.

"The increased velocity benefits the channel partner tremendously," he said, referring to the impact the new converged systems are going to have on solution provider profitability. "That is what they are most excited about. They want to be in a position to add value to customers faster. The faster we can get them to that point the more profitable it is for them, the more deals they can do a year."

The new converged systems required dramatic changes in design, manufacturing and inventory that have resulted in an order to production on the ConvergedSystem 300 for Virtualization in just 20 days and the ConvergedSystem 700 in 30 days, said Joyce. That rapid time from order to production could be a big competitive differentiator in the channel for HP which makes the compute, storage and networking components of the system itself compared with rival VCE which must bring together the compute, storage and networking components from founders Cisco and EMC.

HP is certainly betting that the new systems will reshape the competitive landscape against rivals like Cisco and EMC. Thus, the Shark code name for the systems, symbolizing HP's effort to tear up competitors with the new products that are perfectly engineered for specific tasks such as virtualization or big data, said Joyce. "If a Shark is the best hunting machine on the planet, we wanted these to be the best virtualization and analytics machines on the planet," he said.